Description

Alexa Ranger is fifty, single, and the creative force behind her own lingerie label, and none of it is fun anymore. Her moods swing from contented to maudlin in a blink, her staff argue with her all day, and the last thing she wants is one more cocktail party. She goes anyway, still in her work clothes, promising herself an early night. The party has other plans.

Her daughter Jenna has engineered a two-minute introduction to Casey Carter, a retired Marine with a keen observer’s eye and no intention of being managed. Casey clocks the wariness in Alexa the moment she walks in, and she clocks the menacing glint that says the Gunny is nothing like the men she has spent years keeping at arm’s length. He is also younger than her, well past the eight-year threshold her friend Regina insists separates a Puma from a Cougar. Alexa can already see the headline, Lingerie Mogul Dates Young Marine, and she wants no part of the fallout. What she wants, and what she is willing to admit, turn out to be very different things.

McDonald wrote this book deliberately for readers thirty-five and under, as she says in her acknowledgements, so they would hear from one perfectly average woman that love and sex are great at any age. That conviction runs through every chapter without turning the comedy earnest. The banter is quick, the families interfere constantly, and the central stubbornness belongs to her, not him. If experience means you get to the profound part quicker, why is Alexa the one fumbling in the dark?

Warm, funny, unapologetically grown-up. For romance readers tired of heroines under thirty.

For adult readers of contemporary romance. Explicit content, 18 and over only.